Video Teleconference Call
I'm guessing someone out there might appreciate a slice of my day in our beloved government as the "powers that be" embrace technology and show off their wares, highlighting proficiency of newly acquired skill sets and expertise in the field of communication.
Four photographers were assigned to travel to four different locations here in Texas to photograph a video teleconference call between the four different offices; Austin, Beaumont, Houston and Galveston. This conference call was to begin at 1pm and go on until 3pm. Photos taken of the event were to be downloaded, color corrected, captioned and uploaded to D.C. by 4pm eastern time. (That translates to 3pm Texas time.)
Of course I was shaking my head as usual. If you wanted to document the VTC, all you had to do is select record. The point of a VTC is that you don't have to travel to other locations wasting time and resources, the data and images go instead of you, for you, electronically.
So you have four guys driving hundreds of miles to take photos of images, already being broadcast, that will have to be downloaded onto laptops and emailed, as well as copied to a disk to "fed-ex" overnight to D.C. as a back-up of the images you just took of people sitting around a table watching themselves on TV. Unless of course you were at my assigned station in Galveston.
They had some trouble turning on the Polycom this morning and couldn't connect to any of the other offices (five hours early) and decided the solution was to drive to Houston to join the VTC being conducted there, and of course not informing me of the change.
I have multiple emails stressing the importance of how I had to be there to photograph this event and get the pics up to headquarters pronto. I had to research where the call was being made since that info was not provided to me. I did not have a contact name or phone number to call or any way to contact anyone by any conventional method. They were all on the road driving to Houston.
No info, big demands, no tools to do the job, everything immediately.
When they finally do look at the photos from my end of things, I will be the one fired. Almost smack down time.
Four photographers were assigned to travel to four different locations here in Texas to photograph a video teleconference call between the four different offices; Austin, Beaumont, Houston and Galveston. This conference call was to begin at 1pm and go on until 3pm. Photos taken of the event were to be downloaded, color corrected, captioned and uploaded to D.C. by 4pm eastern time. (That translates to 3pm Texas time.)
Of course I was shaking my head as usual. If you wanted to document the VTC, all you had to do is select record. The point of a VTC is that you don't have to travel to other locations wasting time and resources, the data and images go instead of you, for you, electronically.
So you have four guys driving hundreds of miles to take photos of images, already being broadcast, that will have to be downloaded onto laptops and emailed, as well as copied to a disk to "fed-ex" overnight to D.C. as a back-up of the images you just took of people sitting around a table watching themselves on TV. Unless of course you were at my assigned station in Galveston.
They had some trouble turning on the Polycom this morning and couldn't connect to any of the other offices (five hours early) and decided the solution was to drive to Houston to join the VTC being conducted there, and of course not informing me of the change.
I have multiple emails stressing the importance of how I had to be there to photograph this event and get the pics up to headquarters pronto. I had to research where the call was being made since that info was not provided to me. I did not have a contact name or phone number to call or any way to contact anyone by any conventional method. They were all on the road driving to Houston.
No info, big demands, no tools to do the job, everything immediately.
When they finally do look at the photos from my end of things, I will be the one fired. Almost smack down time.
posted by RJK at
5:05 PM
1 Comments:
It's a shame you couldn't find some sort of tech who knew a little about videoconferencing to get the system working. It was probably something very simple giving the desk-jockies a headache.
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